By Our RepresentativeGujarat-based Dalit rights activist Natubhai Parmar, who created flutter across Gujarat through his unique protest of dumping dead cows in front of the Surendranagar district collector’s office following the Una incident in 2016, in which seven members of a Dalit family were flogged for skinning a dead cow, has asked well-known preacher Murari Bapu to campaign against largescale death of cows because of plastic.The seven Dalits were flogged because cow vigilantes suspected the Dalit family members had killed a cow. The cops had allegedly helped the vigilantes locate the spot where they were skinning the dead cow, a traditional occupation of Rohits, a Dalit community. Following the incident, Dalit protests broke out across Gujarat against cow vigilantism. In a letter, Parmar asked Murari Bapu to come to his Gautam Buddha Goseva Ashram in Surendranagar, where he has displayed plastic taken out of dead cows, pointing out, in his view, it is the plastics which is the main reason behind the unnatural death of cows. “In one of the cows, we weighed 60 kg of plastic was retrieved from a dead cow”, Parmar said, adding, “We informed about this to Gujarat chief minister Vijay Rupani."

Plastic retrieved from dead cow's belly

Pointing out that he has been campaigning against cows eating plastics, which are thrown around everywhere, Parmar said, he sent across his first letter to the Gujarat government on this on December 12, 2014. Then, on May 10, 2017, on Gautam Buddha's birth anniversary, a huge Dalit procession was organized and a memorandum was sent to all the 182 Gujarat state assembly MLAs with bottles with plastic retrieved from dead cows' bellies.Even as appreciating Prime Minister Narendra Modi's decision to ban plastics October 2 onwards, the letter to Murari Bapu said, “You are known to have been successful in your campaigns, whether it was at Kailash Mansorovar, saving a whale, or taking food in a Valmiki household, thus sending the message against untouchability. We request you to come our ashram and send a signal to the society that it is plastics which are the main reason for the untimely death of cows."

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This is the blogging column of Rajiv Shah, editor, Counterview. A little weird, a little satirical, it is called True Lies, the same name which was chosen for his blogging column in the Times of India (TOI). Rajiv's TOI blogs can be accessed here.